So a while back I decided to make myself a VRChat avatar and I built this guy. Took about a month all together, from sketching him out to learning all the steps necessary to build and rig him in Blender, export him to Unity and then to VRChat, but I was pretty happy with the result. Started work on setting up custom emotes, but sort of lost steam at that point.

It was an... interesting journey. Blender has made strides since the last time I used it a decade ago, but every now and then you hit an issue were it shows it's, at the end of the day, a large project built by volunteers. The biggest issue was having to sort of hammer together a process from multiple different tutorials, since most VRChat focused tutorials assume you're just importing a premade model, while Blender character modelling tutorials either assume you're working on super high detail at all times, or don't bother rigging the end result.

I built a high resolution model with different detail tiers, then baked the high res details onto various maps onto the final 26k poly model. I'm not entirely happy with the rigging, I think in the future I would include even more geometry on the joints, but I place part of the blame on Blender's clumsy weight painting tools. I mean, maybe they're good, but not as they are exposed by the default UI.